Jakubisko succeed in his films to catch the most beautiful colors of the life, find the poetry behind the ordinary and to be ahead of his time without forgetting his roots.

This film reflects the hectic period of the Prague Spring and the Soviet invasion that followed in the 1968 summer. Three young orphans Yorick, Andrej and Marta live in a cynical and hopeless world full of violence and disillusionment. They only survive thanks to their own foolishness - trying to play freely in a country which isn't, using an inner philosophy of joy and love. They live, play, love, hate…and die.
Jakubisko: “Foolish games and death are cruel. Maybe too cruel. When I shot my fiction in 1968 there were people lying on the sidewalks. They didn’t have to fake death…”
Shelved for over twenty years, and only released by the censors in 1990, Juraj Jakubisko’s remarkable BIRDS, ORPHANS AND FOOLS — described as “a wild, avantgarde work very much tied to the Czech New Wave of the 1960s” ( International Film Guide) and as a “post-apocalyptic BAND OF OUTSIDERS’ (San Francisco Film Festival) — is an anarchic, absurdist, and ultimately pessimistic celebration of freedom. Two oddball friends, Yorick and Ondrej, live amongst the surreal, ramshackle detritus of a bombed-out church, impossibly littered and overflowing with old furniture, broken cupboards, an out-of-tune piano, staircases leading nowhere, and birds galore. They take in Martha, a young Jewish waif, and one of the cinema’s strangest “ménage a trois” unfolds — complete with a beautiful three-way love scene set in a gutted American convertible. Each of the three principals has been orphaned by war, and each is devoted to playing the fool as a meas of distancing themselves from the horrors they have already absorbed. Their efforts to recreate a family and home soon prove futile, however, as their innocence has no place in the insane world they inhabit. “A mad universe of surrealist tableaux and bizarre actions, with every composition a poem in design and color… This unconventional fantasy blends dream and reality, tenderness and cruelty with a rather spectacular use of distortion lenses, agitated cameras, special tints, visual punts and variable screen sizes… A delirious “tour de force.”” — Amos Vogel, Film as a Subversive Art